The Mind of Donald Trump

It's hard to understand what is going on in the mind of our 47th President. It certainly doesn't seem to bear much resemblance to the mind of our 45th President. This is definitely Trump 2.0.

Finger point steals the show at 2025 State of the Union.

Trump is no longer the black and white caricature that he was in his last term, although there are still times when that Donald Trump emerges. Some people may disagree and say he’s the same old Trump. These are the rabid centrist Democrats and the MAGA devotees. For MAGA supporters, Trump can do no wrong, or for hard-core Dems, he can do no right. Trump is certainly no angel, but then again, if you dig deep will you find even one president who was kind-hearted, peaceful and only wanted to serve the people?

There are those of us who can look at Trump as a wounded human being, who has the power to do much damage to the whole world, or much good. His track record in this term, only about 40 days old, shows some of each tendency.

Trump has been the most active president in years, for better or worse. He’s already issued as many executive orders in his short tenure as his predecessor did in a year.

IMMIGRATION

The problem, as I see it, is that Trump can not think through the ramifications of his changes. A case in point being sending ICE after immigrant farmworkers with the intent of deporting them. A discussion on X.com about Nebraska going bankrupt soon can be attributed to the lack of farm produce being delivered. It is the way the state, as a whole, makes a living.

It is reported that immigrant farm workers, without documents, who are most of the workers in the fields, are not showing up at their job site. And why should they when the Immigration “service,” is cruising the highways and farm roads looking for people to nab.

This is not a problem for Nebraska alone. If you drive between L.A. and San Francisco on I-5 or Hwy 101, you’ll see hundreds of miles of farms and crops, but nary a human being. Yes, the immigrants have taken to hiding, and with them goes the economy of state after state.

There is speculation that individual farmers (who hire the immigrants) will soon be declaring bankruptcy, along with the state of Nebraska. This blowback was not anticipated. Trump’ was thinking only of having a pure-bred population when he decided to deport thousands of immigrants. He never considered this would happen.

As with everything else about Trump, it’s a class issue. If the farm workers, service workers and domestics were rich, there’d be no problem. They would all get a Gold Card. But in reality, the poor get to live under American fascism if they get passed the border guards, and the rich get to live in the lap of luxury.

Unless Trump lets up on his draconian immigration threats, Nebraska will be cleaned out of farmers as surely as it, and many other states, were by the great dust bowl of the 1930s. This kicked off the Great Depression from which the country did not recover until the US began making weapons for the belligerents in the early days of World War II. A ray of sunshine might be that the original owners of Nebraska, the Native Americans, will reoccupy their land.

Where did all the Farm Workers go?

ENDING WARS

Slightly better have been Trump’s foreign policy adventures. After Biden spent his time stoking the fires of death and injuries, it is a welcome change to see a president who, at least, says he wants to end the fighting in Ukraine and Palestine. While neither of these two (or three) countries is living in peace and many people are still dying, peace is at hand. Unless the Europeans sabotage peace talks between Ukraine and Russia, there will be a peace treaty.

Netanyahu’s genocide has been stopped by Trump’s threats and bluster about relocating the Gazans. It has also brought Egypt into play with its promise to administer the Gaza Strip. It is well known in the Middle East that there is no love lost between Egypt and Hamas, and its master, the Muslim Brotherhood, which briefly took over Egypt a few years ago.

Regarding Ukraine, Trump is the first president to even speak with Putin since before Biden was president. These two presidents seem amenable to peacemaking. The blowback has been with the Europeans, who want to fight on, or have the Ukrainians fight on, or even get the Americans to fight on.

You can’t blame the Europeans. For generations they’ve always loved a good war.

THE ANTI-CORRUPTION BLITZ

And lastly, Trump’s DOGE Department was designed to root out corruption and fraud. Well, most of us know that the Washington bureaucracy is full of theft, fraud, graft, and embezzlement. The problem is DOGE’s team, led by Elon Musk, is rooting out the good with the bad. No one should be fired without due process, which means in this case, a fair hearing before a neutral administrative law judge. Since that doesn’t seem to be happening, we can look forward to years of civil and criminal lawsuits. It’s only good for the truly guilty who may avoid jail time because they never had a trial. You can be sure they are not screaming for justice, as are the innocent.

Time was, in the early days of the Republic, whenever a new president from the opposing party was elected, the old bureaucrats were thrown out of their jobs en masse, and the supporters of the winning candidate took over their jobs.

This is what caused the civil service laws to be enacted. Congress established the federal civil service system in 1871. It gave certain rights, including a prohibition on arbitrary firings of today’s three million civil service employees of the executive, legislative, judicial branches, and post offices.

Granted, many of these employees needed to be removed. The USAID, and the National Endowment for the Arts, are nothing more than adjuncts of the CIA. They have been heavily involved in the so-called “color revolutions,” around the world, including Ukraine, Bolivia, and many more countries.

In the Social Security Administration it was apparently too difficult to stop sending monthly checks to the newly deceased. Many families needed those checks to make ends meet so they created a fiction that the dead relative was alive and well, even if they were older than any known human. In such a massive undertaking (excuse the pun), it was not possible to accuse and fire dedicated government workers among the sneaks. Everyone wants to root out corruption, but it has to be done carefully if only the greedy are to be caught.

There are so many stories unfolding between the Gulf of Mexico and Denali that need to be told.